‘Exterminate the Rats’: White Supremacists React to the Milwaukee Uprising

Over the weekend, a 23-year-old black man named Sylville Smith was shot and killed by a member of the Milwaukee Police Department after allegedly fleeing a traffic stop. According to police, Smith was armed with a stolen handgun which he refused to drop, despite having been ordered to do so. And what began as a spontaneous protest of around 200 people quickly turned into a riot.

Right now there is not much information about the killing itself. The officer has not been named due to safety concerns and footage from the officer’s body camera will not be released until sometime later. What is known about Smith is that he had run-ins with the law in the past, but was never convicted of anything more serious than a misdemeanor. According to Smith’s mother, he obtained a concealed carry permit after having been robbed four times and shot twice.

Slowly we will gain more details about the incident, and about the lives of Smith and the officer who took his life. Until then, the unrest continues in Milwaukee, with Governor Scott Walker activating the National Guard on Sunday, followed by the imposition of a citywide curfew. What is known is that — like Baltimore before it and Ferguson before that and Los Angeles before that — Milwaukee was a racial powder keg ready to ignite.

In 2014, Dontre Hamilton, a 31-year-old black man with schizophrenia, was shot and killed by a white Milwaukee police officer. The officer, Christopher Manney, was not charged in spite of the fact that Hamilton was shot fourteen times because, as District Attorney John Chisholm determined, he acted in “self-defense.” And, according to the Brookings Institute, Milwaukee is the “most segregated metro area in the United States.” And yet most of us will still wonder why, for an armed man who fled a traffic stop, ordinary black citizens feel so much pain and anger. And, as we have seen, many people don’t care either way, preferring instead to spew racist invective.